Teensy 4.0 released

[hamster_nz]

If you  haven't seen it, the Teensy 4.0 being released:

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy-4-0/

Gosh, it looks powerful:

Dual-issue superscaler ARM Cortex-M7 at 600 MHz, with branch prediciton and all the other good stuff.
1024K RAM / 2048K Flash
H/W float and doubles.

Runs at about 100mA, and costs $20.

[SiliconWizard]

Not bad. The MCU also supports double precision FP! (Edit: Missed that you mentioned it )

Those boards have very few IOs broken out though, so for an MCU that powerful, I think that would limit a lot what you would do with it. Still pretty nice stuff.

[rstofer]

Thanks for the tip!  I ordered a couple...

[ebclr]

What are the tools to develop on tennsy ?

[SiliconWizard]

Teensy boards can be used with the Arduino environment through an add-on: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_download.html

You can also of course directly use the relevant NXP SDK instead.
See: https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-microcontrollers/i.mx-rt-series/i.mx-rt1060-crossover-processor-with-arm-cortex-m7-core:i.MX-RT1060?tab=Design_Tools_Tab

[firehopper]

Teensy boards can be used with the Arduino environment through an add-on: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_download.html
You can also of course directly use the relevant NXP SDK instead.
See: https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/arm-microcontrollers/i.mx-rt-series/i.mx-rt1060-crossover-processor-with-arm-cortex-m7-core:i.MX-RT1060?tab=Design_Tools_Tab

actually you have to use teensyduino 1.47 beta 5 to use the 4.0 for now till they make a non beta version
https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/54711-Teensy-4-0-First-Beta-Test?p=193715&viewfull=1#post193715

[KE5FX]

Pretty intriguing piece of hardware for $20.  What does it take to support 100 Mb Ethernet with these?  Any good RJ45 PHYs available with ready-made software support?

[Nominal Animal]

What does it take to support 100 Mb Ethernet with these?

The WIZ85io ought to work. (You'll need the $6 adaptor, and a WIZ850io module.)
You could also use the other 480 MBit/s USB port in host mode, and a suitable USB-Ethernet dongle, I guess.

I don't have a 4.0 yet, and I wasn't a beta tester either.  There are also some sharp corners left (having to use a beta version of the Arduino environment, linker script currently copies code so it's run from SRAM and not from Flash directly, and so on), but having been an original Teensy 3.0 Kickstarter backer, my experience says most of those will be ironed out pretty quickly.

[legacy]

if I ever made a debug cable with that Tensee v4.0 stuff for my ARM7TDMI@16.78MHz board, the debug cable based on ARM-Cortex-M7@600MHz would be more light years head than the machine under debug.

That's illogical!   

No doubt about! If the debugging cable is light years ahead than the machine where the same debugging cable is used, then it's logical that you trash it and build a new machine with the same chip used for the debugging cable (or even a better chip), why do you persist in supporting that old stuff?

Good question, no AI will ever able to answer. That's human's peculiarity! We are highly emotional individuals, usually arrogant and prideful to the point of blindness, so assured of fun (or victory, or whatever) that we make decisions based on pride and other emotions.

So ... let's make it, let's build it

[ehughes]

The RT family is quite powerful.     Execution from TCM is quite nice.    Execution from QSPI is very "Meh"

The 1050 Families and below had an GPIO unit that was dorked up.     The internal AHB connection to the GPIO unit was quite odd and was very slow. 

The price of the teensy looks nice.  I hate the fact that there isn't SWD access and it is crippled by by the Arduino system.

[Sal Ammoniac]

if I ever made a debug cable with that Tensee v4.0 stuff for my ARM7TDMI@16.78MHz board, the debug cable based on ARM-Cortex-M7@600MHz would be more light years head than the machine under debug.

That's illogical!   

The Wi-Fi module I use on my Cortex-M3 board (@72 MHz) has a 700 MHz ARM A9 on it!

[legacy]

Anyway, the Tensee-v4 looks "perfect" for building a graphic calculator! I have already reverse-engineered a couple of pocket calculators made by CASIO and Sharp, so ... maybe I will reuse their keyboard and LCD, replacing the motherboard with a Tensee-v4, which has a lot of horsepower for doing mathematical calculous and even more horsepower than the latest CLASSPAD 400.

Currently, I have made a kind of dumb remote terminal with a mathematical keyboard, which sends requests to an RPI running Mathematica and getting back the screenshot with the answer, sent via serial port at 115200bps.

Which is not a "fast" link, but from the user point of view, it looks like a super-fast calculator with a lot of horsepower under the hood, ... just ... wtf is that long cable that connects the pocket calculator to a ... RPI?!? Is there any trick?

Yes, there is a trick, people usually take 25 sec to get that there is a trick, and the true "trick" only works if you set the application screen on the RPI to a quarter of the VGA screen since the LCD is 320x240, with 2 bit of color.

[SiliconWizard]

I hate the fact that there isn't SWD access and it is crippled by by the Arduino system.

As I hinted above, you don't have to use the Arduino system at all. You can perfectly develop using NXP tools directly.

As for SWD: I'm not sure about the Teensy 4.0, but all other versions include an USB bootloader, so you can Flash them directly through USB with a dedicated app that takes a HEX or bin file. Sure you can't debug... but you can Flash it with just anything you like.

Anyway, yeah as I said there are a bit too few IOs broken out to be really useful. I actually made a custom keyboard (HID) out of a Teensy 3.2, and it was rather quick to do, the number of IOs was alright for this application, but barely. I didn't use the Arduino environment whatsoever.

If you're going to want to drive an LCD screen with it and still have enough IOs left for anything else, you're probably going to have to stick to SPI. Not necessarily ideal for an high-res LCD display, probably adequate for a lower res one.

So yeah don't expect to be able to do anything really fancy around this board (unless of course your project needs very few IOs), but as an evaluation platform for this MCU, it's fantastic and very cheap.

[brucehoult]

The price of the teensy looks nice.  I hate the fact that there isn't SWD access and it is crippled by by the Arduino system.

Huh?

Even AVR Arduinos aren't "crippled by the Arduino system" as you're free to use the IDE but not the libraries, or use neither and use avr-gcc and avrdude directly from the command line if you want.

Same here.

Arduino compatibility is a helpful feature for those who want it, not a jail.

[thm_w]

Huh?

Even AVR Arduinos aren't "crippled by the Arduino system" as you're free to use the IDE but not the libraries, or use neither and use avr-gcc and avrdude directly from the command line if you want.

Same here.

Arduino compatibility is a helpful feature for those who want it, not a jail.

No its absolutely not crippled by the arduino system, but if there is no debug its crippled by the idea that "We have a USB/serial bootloader, so its good to go" that applies to some Arduino products.

It looks like the relevant pins are: GPIO_AD_B0_06 to GPIO_AD_B0_10
I don't see a schematic posted anywhere, so some digging into the code is likely necessary to see if these pins are broken out and just not labeled.

[PCB.Wiz]

...
I don't see a schematic posted anywhere, so some digging into the code is likely necessary to see if these pins are broken out and just not labeled.

A  schematic would be great, but the web seems to only have schematics up to 3.6 ??
Maybe someone can post a link to a Teensy 4.0 Schematic ?

[BroMarduk]

Per Paul Stoffregen in the Teensy 4.0 Release thread (posted yesterday):

"The schematic is likely sometime next week. No schematic has been drawn yet, so it's going to take a little while."

[maginnovision]

Yea, he always takes some time to draw a schematic for the website. He doesn't use the board schematic. I think the 4.0 looks really good but I'm sort of disappointed to see the 3.6 form factor with uSD go. I thought it was really nicely done and very useful for a number of projects.

[Fire Doger]

if I ever made a debug cable with that Tensee v4.0 stuff for my ARM7TDMI@16.78MHz board, the debug cable based on ARM-Cortex-M7@600MHz would be more light years head than the machine under debug.

That's illogical!   

No doubt about! If the debugging cable is light years ahead than the machine where the same debugging cable is used, then it's logical that you trash it and build a new machine with the same chip used for the debugging cable (or even a better chip), why do you persist in supporting that old stuff?

Good question, no AI will ever able to answer. That's human's peculiarity! We are highly emotional individuals, usually arrogant and prideful to the point of blindness, so assured of fun (or victory, or whatever) that we make decisions based on pride and other emotions.

So ... let's make it, let's build it

Price
Package complexity
Power requirements
Minimum external components requirement
Availability
Life span
Already used family in other projecs

And algorithms much simpler than AI can choose an MCU based on required IO-features.

[ali_asadzadeh]

Do we have Gerber files for Teensy 4.0!

[luiHS]

 
Very interesting, I have already ordered two units, to try it with the new Teensyduino. We lack the scheme to know which ports are being used, mainly for some applications that require DMA with several contiguous port addresses.

Although it had been known for a long time, I was totally disappointed that it was not done with the format of size and quantity of ports available in Teensy 3.5 and 3.6. Such a small format, Teensy 3.2 style, for a processor as powerful as the RT series, is a series limitation. I find it incompressible, to make such a powerful product, but to limit it so much in terms of available ports.

[SiliconWizard]

Do we have Gerber files for Teensy 4.0!

Well, if the author is not going to release the original schematic but some hand-reprocessed version of it for publishing needs, I kind of doubt they will release the Gerbers or any EDA file directly. Just a guess though.

[SiliconWizard]

Although it had been known for a long time, I was totally disappointed that it was not done with the format of size and quantity of ports available in Teensy 3.5 and 3.6. Such a small format, Teensy 3.2 style, for a processor as powerful as the RT series, is a series limitation. I find it incompressible, to make such a powerful product, but to limit it so much in terms of available ports.

Yes, that was my point too.

OTOH, I can completely understand the objectives of the author. They aren't looking to compete with full-blown dev boards. There are thousands of them on the market already. They are releasing small and easy to work with boards at a very low cost.

As they did for older versions, they may release an ulterior version later on with a slightly larger form factor and more IOs broken out.

If you're looking for almost as cheap and a lot more flexible dev boards, you can go for the STM32 Nucleo boards. Pretty much all between $20 and $30. Pick a Nucleo board with an STM32H7 on it, relatively close in performance with this NXP chip (although not quite). Currently $27 I think.

[luiHS]

If you're looking for almost as cheap and a lot more flexible dev boards, you can go for the STM32 Nucleo boards. Pretty much all between $20 and $30. Pick a Nucleo board with an STM32H7 on it, relatively close in performance with this NXP chip (although not quite). Currently $27 I think.

STM32H7 microcontrollers are much more expensive than RT. I'm starting to use the RT1020 in LQFP144, they cost about $ 5, while the STM32H7, which are also less powerful, cost about $ 19 or more. I will not use the Teensy or any other premade board, to make my products. I only use those boards for testing.

The good thing about the Teensy environment, is the large number of libraries available, and a lot of sample source code, from which many developments can be made.

It's been a while since I ruled out using the H7, my bet is on the NXP RT series.

[SiliconWizard]

Didn't notice those NXP parts were this "cheap". That's impressive.